Traceable surface characterization of a hydrophobic material using confocal optical microscopy

Abstract This work aims to develop a method to traceably characterize structured surfaces. This method includes instrument calibration considering the metrological characteristics defined by ISO 25178-602: 2010, form removal by SVD and LS method, algorithm development, definition of PDF of those input variables, estimate the height parameters Sa, Sq, Ssk, Sku , etc. and evaluate the coverage region of 95%. Validation of this developed algorithm is based on a physical measurement standard and data provided by NIST. The first validation shows 0.0034 µm difference between the calculated Sa and certificated Ra . The second validation compared those height parameters and the differences are as small as -9.2535×10 -5 nm. Finally, characterization of the surface height parameters of a hydrophobic material, calculation of the correlation coefficient of the height parameters, and reconstruction as well as histograms of those height parameters is presented.